Saturday, April 30, 2016

another poem on last day of poetry month 2016. . . . I've posted two fierce poems today.

A Brief for the Defense. by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

We were supposed to do a job in Italy and full of our feeling for ourselves
(our sense of being Poets from
America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the Mayor,
mulled a couple
matters over. (what’s cheap date, they asked us: what’s flat drink)
Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the
academic,the apologist, the arrogant,
the amorous, the brazen and the
glib.
And there was one administrator (The Conservative),in suit of
regulation gray,
who like a good tour guide with measured pace and
uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us
past.
Of all he was most politic — and least poetic — so it seemed.
Our last few days in Rome I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written:
it was there in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor
(was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian either, so I put the book back in the wardrobe’s dark.
We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and
chatted, sat and chewed, till sensible it was our last big chance to be
Poetic, make our mark, one of us asked “What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori or the statue there?”
Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn’t have to think —
“The truth is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say.
What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our
underestimated host spoke out all of a sudden, with a rising passion,
and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno, Brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say the Church.
His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being:
God is no fixed point or central government but rather is poured in
waves, through all things: All things move. “If God is not the soul
itself he is the soul of the soul of the world.”
Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die they feared he might incite the crowd
(the manwas famous for his eloquence).
And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask in which he could not speak.
That is how they burned him.
That is how he died, without a word,in front of everyone.
And poetry —

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)
—
poetry is what he thought, but did not say.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

I've been neglecting poetry month, which is April. I have a couple days left!

A Woman Speaks
By Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound.